Subject: Re: groff question: update needs less -R
To: None <tech-userlevel@netbsd.org>
From: Thomas Klausner <wiz@netbsd.org>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 06/15/2003 09:45:17
On Sun, Jun 15, 2003 at 10:00:43AM +0900, ITOH Yasufumi wrote:
> - This makes colcrt(1) and ul(1) useless.

We could teach them about ANSI escape sequences...

On Sun, Jun 15, 2003 at 07:01:52AM +0100, David Laight wrote:
> Why does is need colour?
> There is nothing in any of the troff source that requires different
> colours!

It's a new "feature"! Be a bit more progressive! :)
There are new macros:
.color on/off
.defcolor for defining a name for a colour
\m and \M for setting fg and bg colour

> > The command line option to switch back to compat-behaviour
> > is not a toggle, so if we want to allow the ANSI behaviour
> > too, we'd diverge a bit from "normal" groff.
> 
> Eh? What does the command line option do then?

It's not a toggle that works both ways; in default groff, there's
just a command line option to turn it off.
I guess it should be a made a toggle instead, and perhaps that
change even gets accepted back.

On Sun, Jun 15, 2003 at 09:50:40AM +0300, Alan Barrett wrote:
> Last time you raised this issue (in February 2003), I demonstrated that
> "less -R" does not do the right thing if you have a terminal that does
> not handle ANSI escape sequences.  Here's part of my previous message
> again:

Sorry, I had totally forgotten about that mail of yours. Thanks
for reminding me.

> Doing the right thing requires parsing the escape sequences on input,
> and translating them to whatever is appropriate for the output device.

Are you interested in pinging the less and groff authors about this
problem?

Thanks for all the comments!
 Thomas